NOTES FROM HERE AND THERE

Lewis Dolinsky

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, September 20, 2000

A CRUSADER FRUSTRATED BY INDIFFERENCE

Denis Halliday's message is not getting across, at least not fast enough. Halliday, an Irishman who resigned as chief of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq because he found it to be a sham and shameful, came to the Bay Area in February 1999, saying U.N. sanctions were killing Iraqi civilians. He was back last weekend, running from event to event. He acknowledged that although some minds have changed in the West, the deprivation in Iraq is the same or worse: Thousands of children under 5 die each month.

Halliday assigns Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 30 percent of the blame: He could build fewer palaces and provide more for his people. He could be more amenable to U.N. demands. But Saddam's ammunition against sanctions is the visible suffering of civilians. He uses that suffering to get at the West, as we use it to get at him. Neither strategy works, so the stalemate and the deaths continue. But Halliday asks why we should expect more of a cruel dictator than we expect of ourselves. And why aren't more of us outraged at what is done in our name?

In the American past, if children had no-account parents who did not provide for them, that was not our problem. Now, some say, "It Takes a Village." They are all our sons and daughters. But Iraq is not part of our village. It's a different culture; it's an enemy; it's far away. And Saddam Hussein keeps making threatening noises.

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Halliday says: Perhaps Americans don't understand that this is not a question of not helping, this is about hurting. The sin is one of commission, not omission. We are preventing Iraqi civilians -- children -- from getting the necessities of life. Such as clean water.

At the U.N. Millennium Summit, Halliday's former boss, Secretary- General Kofi Annan, advocated humanitarian intervention. Annan said governments and dictators cannot be allowed to hide behind borders; we must reach out and protect the human rights of all peoples. Halliday says that includes Iraqis. We think of protecting people from a bad ruler; Halliday is asking us to stop persecuting a people in order to oust a bad ruler.

Scott Ritter, a former arms inspector in Iraq, appeared with Halliday last weekend. He says that the United States never set out to hurt children but that by 1995, the U.S. government knew sanctions were not succeeding and saw the collateral damage. "We're not supposed to operate this way. I was trained for war. But even in war, it's not legal to carry out orders to kill children."

AIDS ADVISORY

Leaders of the health committee of South African President Thabo Mbeki's party, the African National Congress, have asked him to acknowledge that HIV causes AIDS. In excerpts from a draft document leaked to the Cape Times, the health committee said, "We have identified the cause. The infectious agent is HIV, which is a retrovirus. The predominant scientific view that HIV causes AIDS is the view that the ANC, its leadership and its membership (have) to publicly express."

An ANC official told health writer Judith Soal, "The health minister was furious and demanded that we withdraw the document. We refused because this is a moral stand."

It is also good politics. Amid South Africa's AIDS epidemic, Mbeki's reluctance to accept drugs to combat HIV (whatever the rationale) could hurt the ANC and its allies in the November municipal elections.

FIJI'S COUP EXPLAINED

Fiji's coup in May -- hostages in the Parliament -- seemed to be about race: Indigenous Fijians resented the more affluent Indian minority, one of whom, Mahendra Chaudhry, had become prime minister. But according to stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, a prime motivation was money from mahogany, which Fijians call "green gold" or "white man's trees." In Fiji, the wood is farmed rather than wild, so marketing it is politically correct and all the more lucrative.

George Speight, who led the coup against Chaudhry but is now in custody, had been chairman of Fiji Hardwood Corp. under Fiji's previous government. Speight, an ethnic Fijian, was in league with American businessman Marshall Pettit in a deal that could have netted Pettit $100 million and made Speight the "timber king" of Fiji. Instead, Chaudhry accepted a much lower bid from a British government company, partly to retain British backing for Fiji's sugar exports to the European Union. As the American deal slipped away, U.S. Ambassador Osman Siddique stormed into Chaudhry's office and said, "You can do what you want with your f-- forest!"

Speight didn't just get mad at Chaudhry. Appealing to racism and to the economic interest of landowners, Speight got even.

LAND OF GIANTS

Australia doesn't have large animals, but it did, as the Australian Museum in Sydney indicates. A current exhibition, "Australia's Lost Kingdoms," has life-size representations of a flesh-eating kangaroo and a vegetarian kangaroo that was 6- foot-6; a huge turtle with horns like a bull; a marsupial lion with claws like can openers; and a crocodile that attacked from trees (the "drop croc"). There is also a skeleton of what may have been a carnivorous duck weighing 800 pounds; it had a bill like an axe.

Anne Musser, an American paleontologist (and San Jose State alumna) who did some of the reconstruction of these critters, says an unfriendly climate was the major reason they were wiped out. She says most of them overlapped with the earliest Aborigines. For those homo sapiens, every day must have been an adventure.